In the lighter style, Catullus exercised a perfect fascination over the Italians. Not a few elegant Latin madrigals, not a few little satires and malicious epistles, are mere adaptations from him; and the death of parrots and lapdogs is bewailed, even where there is no verbal imitation, in precisely the tone and style of the verses on Lesbia’s Sparrow. There are short poems of this sort, the date of which even a critic would be unable to fix,[617] in the absence of positive evidence that they are works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
On the other hand, we can find scarcely an ode in the Sapphic or Alcaic metre, which does not clearly betray its modern origin. This is shown mostly by a rhetorical verbosity, rare in antiquity before the time of Statius, and by a singular want of the lyrical concentration which is indispensable to this style of poetry. Single passages in an ode, sometimes two or three strophes together, may look like an ancient fragment; but a longer extract will seldom keep this character throughout. And where it does so, as, for instance, in the fine Ode to Venus, by Andrea Navagero, it is easy to detect a simple paraphrase of ancient masterpieces.[618] Some of the ode-writers take the saints for their subject, and invoke them in verses tastefully modelled after the pattern of analogous odes of Horace and Catullus. This is the manner of Navagero, in the Ode to the Archangel Gabriel, and particularly of Sannazaro ([p. 260]), who goes still further in his appropriation of pagan sentiment. He celebrates above all his patron saint,[619] whose chapel was attached to his lovely villa on the shores of Posilippo, ‘there where the waves of the sea drink up the stream from the rocks, and surge against the walls of the little sanctuary.’ His delight is in the annual feast of S. Nazzaro, and the branches and garlands with which the chapel is hung on this day, seem to him like sacrificial gifts. Full of sorrow, and far off in exile, at St. Nazaire, on the banks of the Loire, with the banished Frederick of Aragon, he brings wreaths of box and oak leaves to his patron saint on the same anniversary, thinking of former years, when all the youth of Posilippo used to come forth to greet him on flower-hung boats, and praying that he may return home.[620]
Perhaps the most deceptive likeness to the classical style is borne by a class of poems in elegiacs or hexameters, whose subject ranges from elegy, strictly so-called, to epigram. As the humanists dealt most freely of all with the text of the Roman elegiac poets, so they felt themselves most at home in imitating them. The elegy of Navagero addressed to the night, like other poems of the same age and kind, is full of points which remind us of his models; but it has the finest antique ring about it. Indeed Navagero[621] always begins by choosing a truly poetical subject, which he then treats, not with servile imitation, but with masterly freedom, in the style of the Anthology, of Ovid, of Catullus, or of the Virgilian eclogues. He makes a sparing use of mythology, only, for instance, to introduce a sketch of country life, in a prayer to Ceres and other rural divinities. An address to his country, on his return from an embassy to Spain, though left unfinished, might have been worthy of a place beside the ‘Bella Italia, amate sponde’ of Vincenzo Monti, if the rest had been equal to this beginning:
‘Salve, cura Deûm, mundi felicior ora,
Formosae Veneris dulces salvete recessus;
Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores
Aspicio lustroque libens, ut munere vestro
Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas!’[622]
The elegiac or hexametral form was that in which all higher sentiment found expression, both the noblest patriotic enthusiasm (see p. 119, the elegy on Julius II.) and the most elaborate eulogies on the ruling houses,[623] as well as the tender melancholy of a Tibullus. Francesco Mario Molza, who rivals Statius and Martial in his flattery of Clement VII. and the Farnesi, gives us in his elegy to his ‘comrades,’ written from a sick-bed, thoughts on death as beautiful and genuinely antique as can be found in any of the poets of antiquity, and this without borrowing anything worth speaking of from them.[624] The spirit and range of the Roman elegy were best understood and reproduced by Sannazaro, and no other writer of his time offers us so varied a choice of good poems in this style as he. We shall have occasion now and then to speak of some of these elegies in reference to the matter they treat of.
The Latin epigram finally became in those days an affair of serious importance, since a few clever lines, engraved on a monument or quoted with laughter in society, could lay the foundation of a scholar’s celebrity. This tendency showed itself early in Italy. When it was known that Guido della Polenta wished to erect a monument at Dante’s grave, epitaphs poured in from all directions,[625] ‘written by such as wished to show themselves, or to honour the dead poet, or to win the favour of Polenta.’ On the tomb of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti (d. 1354), in the Cathedral at Milan, we read at the foot of 36 hexameters: ‘Master Gabrius de Zamoreis of Parma, Doctor of Laws, wrote these verses.’ In course of time, chiefly under the influence of Martial, and partly of Catullus, an extensive literature of this sort was formed. It was held the greatest of all triumphs, when an epigram was mistaken for a genuine copy from some old marble,[626] or when it was so good that all Italy learned it by heart, as happened in the case of some of Bembo’s. When the Venetian government paid Sannazaro 600 ducats for a eulogy in three distichs,[627] no one thought it an act of generous prodigality. The epigram was prized for what it was, in truth, to all the educated classes of that age—the concentrated essence of fame. Nor, on the other hand, was any man then so powerful as to be above the reach of a satirical epigram, and even the most powerful needed, for every inscription which they set before the public eye, the aid of careful and learned scholars, lest some blunder or other should qualify it for a place in the collections of ludicrous epitaphs.[628] The epigraph and the epigram were branches of the same pursuit; the reproduction of the former was based on a diligent study of ancient monuments.
The city of epigrams and inscriptions was, above all others, Rome. In this state without hereditary honours, each man had to look after his own immortality, and at the same time found the epigram an effective weapon against his competitors. Pius II. counts with satisfaction the distichs which his chief poet Campanus wrote on any event of his government which could be turned to poetical account. Under the following popes satirical epigrams came into fashion, and reached, in the opposition to Alexander VI. and his family, the highest pitch of defiant invective. Sannazaro, it is true, wrote his verses in a place of comparative safety, but others in the immediate neighbourhood of the court ventured on the most reckless attacks ([p. 112]). On one occasion when eight threatening distichs were found fastened to the door of the library,[629] Alexander strengthened his guard by 800 men; we can imagine what he would have done to the poet if he had caught him. Under Leo X., Latin epigrams were like daily bread. For complimenting or for reviling the pope, for punishing enemies and victims, named or unnamed, for real or imaginary subjects of wit, malice, grief, or contemplation, no form was held more suitable. On the famous group of the Virgin with Saint Anna and the Child, which Andrea Sansovino carved for S. Agostino, no less than 120 persons wrote Latin verses, not so much, it is true, from devotion, as from regard for the patron who ordered the work.[630] This man, Johann Goritz of Luxemburg, papal referendary of petitions, not only held a religious service on the feast of Saint Anna, but gave a great literary dinner in his garden on the slopes of the Capitol. It was then worth while to pass in review, in a long poem ‘De poetis urbanis,’ the whole crowd of singers who sought their fortune at the court of Leo. This was done by Franciscus Arsillus[631]—a man who needed the patronage neither of pope nor prince, and who dared to speak his mind, even against his colleagues. The epigram survived the pontificate of Paul III. only in a few rare echoes, while the epigraph continued to flourish till the seventeenth century, when it perished finally of bombast.
In Venice, also, this form of poetry had a history of its own, which we are able to trace with the help of the ‘Venezia’ of Francesco Sansovino. A standing task for the epigram-writers was offered by the mottos (Brievi) on the pictures of the Doges in the great hall of the ducal palace—two or four hexameters, setting forth the most noteworthy facts in the government of each.[632] In addition to this, the tombs of the Doges in the fourteenth century bore short inscriptions in prose, recording merely facts, and beside them turgid hexameters or leonine verses. In the fifteenth century more care was taken with the style; in the sixteenth century it is seen at its best; and then soon after came pointless antithesis, prosopopœia, false pathos, praise of abstract qualities—in a word, affectation and bombast. A good many traces of satire can be detected, and veiled criticism of the living is implied in open praise of the dead. At a much later period we find a few instances of a deliberate recurrence to the old, simple style.
Architectural works and decorative works in general were constructed with a view to receiving inscriptions, often in frequent repetition; while the Northern Gothic seldom, and with difficulty, offered a suitable place for them, and in sepulchral monuments, for example, left free only the most exposed parts—namely the edges.
By what has been said hitherto we have, perhaps, failed to convince the reader of the characteristic value of this Latin poetry of the Italians. Our task was rather to indicate its position and necessity in the history of civilisation. In its own day, a caricature of it appeared[633]—the so-called maccaronic poetry. The masterpiece of this style, the ‘opus maccaronicorum,’ was written by Merlinus Coccaius (Teofilo Folengo of Mantua). We shall now and then have occasion to refer to the matter of this poem. As to the form—hexameter and other verses, made up of Latin words and Italian words with Latin endings—its comic effect lies chiefly in the fact that these combinations sound like so many slips of the tongue, or the effusions of an over-hasty Latin ‘improvisatore.’ The German imitations do not give the smallest notion of this effect.